What is Contextroversy?
1.
When people take a quote out of context and attempt to make a controversy out of it, while pushing that one snippet so hard that the real quote never gains traction.
The GOP is attempting to create a contextroversy with the Sonia Sotomayor nomination, just as they did with Al Gore and the internet.
The Sonia Sotomayor nomination focuses on a quote about a "wise Latina woman" in which the right wing left out this part of what she said:
"Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences." Judge Sonia Sotomayor, October 27, 2001, Berkeley Law
There is also the Al Gore contextroversy, where he said that he "took the initiative" in helping to bring the internet to fruition.
You can find the following on the net if you search for Cerf and Gore:
According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"
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